I was already far away from where I had started my walk. To carry my tripod and the middle-format camera in the heat like this was not an easy job - the straps had left a black and salty X mark across my chest. To keep on the shadow side of a street did not help a lot, I was still sweating like hell. I reached Alaz sokagi and was wondering if a street can be steeper than this? That was where I found a thrown away single-leaf door. It happened while I was checking out the mess in the ruins of an abandoned house. And here it was. My first “door piece” in Istanbul.

Firstly, I installed the tripod to mark my territory. Then I brought the objects from the ruin to the place that seemed to fascinate me the most: the entrance of the house No. 40.

I could make my first photographs from the side-walk, but it was obvious that at some point I would finish my shooting session standing in the middle of the road. Around the same time kids started a soccer game right above me, their ball constantly threatening either the sculptural construct or the camera on the tripod. Just before I put together the last version of the installation, they seemed to have realized that my person promised more excitement that the ball. I tried to focus on work despite their attempts to attract my attention by ever increasing intrusion. Without much success, they tried to remember the few words they had in their English vocabulary. I was desperate to complete my last picture, so I tried to ignore them. After I was finished I went down the steep street with kids yelling behind me vocables of lingua franca: "fuck you", "mother fucker"...

Istanbul 2012 shows the process of research through repetition. The amount of 12 photographs in each of these series was determined by the use of a middle format camera and rolls of 120mm films. In the foreground the same street-found-objects are re-arranged through the study of balance, composition and context while the background sometimes changes due to the shifting position of the camera. The documenting photographs create a third space where foreground and background interact and enjoy the viewers attention.